A plan to cut government funding for TV and films that are deemed offensive or not in the public’s interest sure sounds like trouble in my mind.  While I can appreciate that perhaps they don’t want to be caught giving money to people making pornos (although that’s the only clear decision I can come to at the moment) the government is probably not going to be the best judge of art for anything that’s close to the line.

It’s funny but the Trailer Park Boys is mentioned in the article right away, despite the show being a hit it probably does offend just about everybody eventually.  In the best, funniest, least reverent way that I can imagine.  I can’t see many church groups tuning in, if you know what I mean.  Fortunately Nikki and I are already tainted so it can’t hurt us anymore.

Then again, as the article mentions there has always been at least a few checks and balances on this kind of funding (although the TPB have been receiving money from the beginning, so you do kind of wonder just what kind of checks there really are)  and the government hasn’t funded any pornos yet.  Or probably not any good ones.

So there you go, the wheel keeps turning.

 I saw a link on Metafilter titled “the secret to raising smart kids”, so I was of course interested immediately. It was a great read, and is something that I can identify with in my own rather erratic scholastic career. Basically the idea is that there are two ways kids can think of intelligence; something that is like a talent, fixed and something you either have or you don’t, or you can think of it as something you can develop with hard work, which is therefore limitless.  Kids that have been told they are smart when they do something well (or when they succeed without expending any effort) eventually become averse to hard work and attempting something difficult (which they inevitably run into at some point) because they value looking smart over actually working hard to achieve something. Good marks are similarly valued, instead of actually learning how to work through a problem, regardless of getting the correct answer. 

 This is a fundamental difference of course, and the article refers to some studies that actually support these theories.  They took kids and told some of them that intelligence is something that can be developed like a muscle, and these kids turned their school year around.  They displayed much more persistence and resilience to failure on a hard problem than the rest of their class.  For these kids, failure is a sign of a lack of effort, not because you are dumb.  It’s amazing such a seemingly simple tactic can have such an effect, but there you go.

 I highly recommend the read, it resonated strongly with me.  I definitely walked right through high school with hardly any effort at all and as a result sucked pretty bad when a real challenge came around in university. 

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids